I “had” a 24 in Samsung monitor that would no longer display. It was acting kooky for a few weeks before it finally just died and started making weird clicking sounds. Now this was a pretty nice monitor that I spent near 500 bucks on about 2 and half years ago so I wasn’t exactly thrilled with it dying this soon. So I go to best buy with the monitor and tell them I’m 95% sure it’s the monitor because I hooked up another monitor and it is working fine. So they say they can try to repair it, it will cost 85 bucks to ship and that my best solution is to just buy a new one because you’ll spend just as much money fixing the old one. Naturally. So I know that my desktop is 4+ years old and this might be a good time to upgrade anyway so I begin to look at some laptops because it would come in handy. So I talk to the salesman, who doesn’t work on commission, and come away with a model I like. I ask him if there is any advantage to ordering through Best Buy opposed to Dell. He really can’t give me an answer so I was happy to know they were out of stock so I just bought direct. It doesn’t solve my monitor solution but for the moment I have a 15″ little guy to use thanks to Evan.

During my Best Buy trip I was looking around and noticed how slim their CD inventory has gotten. I thought of a few bands I liked and bought the newest Anberlin and Arcade Fire CD for ten bucks each. Anberlin was a mere 10 tracks and Arcade Fire 15 but the price was certainly right. I remember the days when they had rows and rows and CD’s were still in before this new age of dl’ding music existed. Nevertheless I will listen to them in my car for a bit and probably write about them in the future.
After Best Buy I went to Barnes and Nobel to pick up some books. Business books tend to pique my interest and I wasn’t surprised to see tons of books on blogging to make money, how to use facebook, and a plethora of books on Google and the banking industry’s collapse. So then I browsed some fiction books and just couldn’t really come up with anything (if you’ve read a good book, I’d be glad if you shared it with me). I ended up leaving the store empty handed. I then went to Target and bought 2 pairs of mesh shorts because I’ve had a few pairs mysteriously disappear and a new wallet because my old one had a rip in the side with the cards and they had a tendency to all fall out. I also bought the 2nd Stieg Larsson book and will read it after I finish Michael Connelly’s Black Ice.

What I realized was that I didn’t have to do any of what I just did physically. I could have easily bought everything I left with online and probably didn’t even have to take my monitor to Best Buy to get the information. Yes I would have had to wait a day or two for the goods but I was in no rush for anything. So not only could I have saved time but probably money as well. It’s no wonder shopping on the internet has revolutionized business practices. Retail stores are on their way out and most business models concentrating on physical retail have a big hurdle to jump. Our generation from 18-35 will rely on the internet for EVERYTHING if we don’t already. It’s sort of wild to think like that and then comprehend that baby boomers have a harder time grasping this fact. I just sort of really realized it today when it came to my attention that I completely wasted my time. The one advantage is though that you get to see everything which there really is no substitute. I can see how some people wouldn’t feel comfortable shopping without that. For me though, I don’t try anything on and size myself up and buy goods that I am not too worried if they fit perfectly. Just an interesting thing to note.

Off topic, something that is funny is when there is a song that an artist covers that no one really knows is a cover. I heard “the first cut is the deepest” the other day and my first thought is that it’s a song by Sheryl Crow. Wrong. The artist that sang the song I was listening to was Rod Stewart. Even he didn’t write the song, I wikipedia’d it and turns out it was written by Cat Stevens. Funny how without doing the research, you would have no idea who created that song. Another music sham that goes around in today’s age that people may not be to privy to is older songs beats used as background music. I heard a relatively new song by Nikki Minaj and Will.I.Am called “Check it out”.

Background music is Video Killed the Radio Star by the Buggles. Good trivia that anyone who knows music knows, this was the first video aired by MTV. Thing is, younger people have no idea that this beat was from this song and just attribute it to these artists. I don’t necessarily think there is anything wrong with it, but I’m just pointing out how creative these new artists are to reuse all these beats from old songs. Just another interesting tidbit.